Okay, now .. why should you check your site for broken links? .. only one reason, .. search engines. I’m not a search engine freak but I do know that I want my site to be recognized on search engines. One of the things that I learned while researching why to not have broken links is that broken links signify to search engines that the site could be “defunct” or in a state of non-use, so it lowers it’s ‘value’ when it finds them, the more you have the worse it gets. .. .This is what one website says about it:

“Broken Links: Having too many broken links on a page may be a sign of a neglected or abandoned site. The Google Rater Guidelines Document uses broken links as one was to assess a homepage’s quality.”

One of the things I noticed while using the plugin mentioned above is that it also checks COMMENT AUTHOR links, ya know .. those URLS people can put in with their name and email when making a comment.. Apparently those can count against you as well! .. gah.

If you’re like me and you’ve been around a very long time with comments dating back years, most of those people have changed urls several times or even gave fictitious ones .. well I don’t want those to count against me. … So using the plugin before, there’s a clickable thing on it that says “unlink” and it automatically gets rid of the link.

There’s another tab for ‘redirects’ .. ignore the ones that say 200 OK and fix the ones that say anything but that.

Note: There’s a ‘status’ column on the plugin, ONLY get rid of ones that return 404 error or server not found, the other status’s are fine, as far as I know if anyone wants to interject on that.

– Phil

Note2: I’ve been at it for several hours now fixing broken links in posts and such; expect to be spending some time on it.

—- I noticed a lot of people put in www.theirsite.com when their site is recognized by theirsite.com without the www part of it. When giving people your URL make sure you use the correct one, the one that comes up in your URL bar when going to it.

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Discussion (3) ¬

Is there a way to disable the link globally so the comment form only asks for name and email address for gravatar? Every one in a while I get a wave of comments that are like “What a great technique, thanks for the blog” with no link, but then the spam link is in the URL for the comment form. It’d be nice if I could disable that.